Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Today’s guest post is
jointly authored by members of the 2016 cohort of the History Museum Fellows
Program—a partnership between the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota
Historical Society (MNHS) that engages students in studying the challenges
related to the underrepresentation of communities of color, American Indian
Nations and other marginalized groups in historical organizations, museums, and
public history graduate programs. Diversity and inclusivity is a strategic
priority for the Minnesota Historical Society, and through this program MNHS hopes
to train potential future museum workers and leaders and provide an opportunity
for these students to effect change from inside the museum.

As
the population in the United States continues to grow in size and become even
more diverse, and as people push for visibility and validation of issues such
as the reality of police violence against marginalized communities, Indigenous
Treaty rights, the right to clean water and transgender acceptance and
protection under the law continue to, museums must grow their depth of
understanding of and response to segments ofthe public that have traditionally been excluded. The future of museums
in the United States depends on the institutional embrace of a diversity and
inclusivity that is socially responsible and socially responsive.

The
Department of Inclusion and Community Engagement at the Minnesota Historical
Society (MNHS) is modeling this behavior with their History Museum Fellows
Program (HMFP), which is a partnership between the University of Minnesota Twin
Cities and the Minnesota Historical Society. The program consists of a
semester-long course, which introduces Fellows to general museum concepts and
critical thought around museums in relation to diversity and inclusion; a paid,
summer-long internship or externship; and a work trip to Washington D.C. during
which Fellows visit national museums and meet with museum professionals from
various backgrounds and departments. The hope is to inspire these students to
be interested in the museum field and to build allies for museums amongst
diverse and underrepresented communities. Our cohort—the seventh since HMFP
began—recently wrapped up the program on August 29, 2016.

HMFP 2016 Fellows Collaborating

Throughout
the summer Fellows led seven projects that centered on diversity and inclusion.
One project researched the development of Learning and Development modules designed
to teach MNHS staff skill sets needed to execute the institution’s diversity
and inclusion initiative. This training included recognizing the difference
between cultural appropriation and appreciation, transgender language and
policy sensitivity, and emotional intelligence. Fellows also researched, designed
and prepared the launch of a pilot program for TEACH (Traveling Exhibits to
Amplify Community History), an initiative to share stories from marginalized
communities in more accessible ways. This project was based on oral interviews
and community relationship-building amongst a local African American community,
a population that has been previously underserved by MNHS. Fellows also led the
development and execution of Waryaa, a cultural exchange program between
Minnesota’s Hmong community and Sweden, and Summertech, a multiweek long
program for Latino students in the Twin Cities in which they learn skills such
as library research and website development while researchinga topic of their choosing (this year’s topic was
the Brown Berets).

“The
project that had the biggest impact on my experience was a collections project
focused on Black Lives Matter initiated by the 3D collections department. Four
fellows were brought on to assist the collections department in finding objects
that belonged to community members and activists within the BLM movement in MN.
I was excited to be a part of the project but also felt that after learning
about the lack of connection the Minnesota Historical Society has with the
black community I, along with the other fellows, became more and more skeptical
that MNHS was in fact ready to take on this collections project.”

Members of the 2016 Cohort

Fellows
involved in BLM pushed to change the goals of the project from a traditional
collections approach to focusing more deeply on genuine community
relationship-building. Concurrently in the institution there was a discussion
about the possibilities of digital archives in the vein of Documenting Ferguson—a free
resource created by Washington University in St. Louis that preserves and makes
accessible the digital media captured by community members following the
shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. As a
result of both these conversations, Fellows were brought in to act as
consultants and co-creators in refining of this new idea and determining
community outreach plans. MNHS now has a cross-departmental project development
team, one that has support from top leadership at the institution, devoted to
creating what could become a digital archive documenting aspects of Black life
in Minnesota. Digital archives as a form of nontraditional collecting is a new
endeavor whose success could bolster Minnesota Historical Society’s relevance
and name recognition in communities that were previously underserved by the institution.

Museums
must pursue endeavors that may at first be uncomfortable for the dominant
majority if they wish to retain social and cultural relevancy. This includes responding
to the social factors that are influencing the publics that the museum serves. Museums
can practice responsiveness by keeping informed by their diverse publics and by
welcoming marginalized/oppressed peoples to the conversation

Through
the History Museum Fellows Program, MNHS is practicing social responsibility
and responsiveness by providing an avenue for those who traditionally fall outside
of the engaged museum audience to get inside and push the internal culture of
museum in new and critical ways.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Readers of CFM’s TrendsWatch reports and followers of this Blog will know of my fascination with the emerging business model of museums running co-working spaces. It’s such a genius use of museum resources (staff expertise, visitors, inspiring space, the general aura of “cool”) to leverage earned and philanthropic income. Earlier this year Katrina Sedgwick, director of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, contributed a guest post about ACMI X, her museum’s venture into coworking. So when I stumbled across a particularly interesting immersive VR theatre project this summer, I was delighted (though unsurprised) to find it was created by an ACMI X member. Katrina put me in touch with Sandpit, the studio that created the project, and I invited them to tell us about coworking in a museum from the point of view of a tenant.

My name is Dan Koerner and I’m a creative director of Sandpit, a digital studio based in both Adelaide and Melbourne, Australia. Sandpit is slightly unusual in the work we produce in that we predominantly make things where the physical world meets the digital. Some examples from the last couple of years: an interactive after-hours audio tour of Melbourne Zoo, a web-connected phone booth for sharing stories at Penguin Books and an answering machine service for artists in Reykjavík, Iceland. Increasingly, we’re working on a wide range of exhibits for museums.

"I, Animal"--An Interactive, After-Hours Tourof Melbourne Zoo

Screens often take a backseat in the work we produce as we focus on allowing users to use their eyes, ears and hands in the real world, augmented by Sandpit’s technologies. For that reason, it was interesting when, in October last year, we were approached by Katrina Sedgwick, the CEO for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Katrina invited us into ACMI X, a new co-working space for artists, freelancers and organisations working in and around the moving image in Melbourne. ACMI X was to be a purpose-built space, embedded within the museum. The idea of the space was to foster a creative culture that champions collaboration, innovation and sustainability for individuals, collectives and businesses working with the moving image.

There are so many obvious benefits to this scenario that it’s almost strange to think of it as innovative. Why haven’t institutions been doing this forever? As tenants we have relaxed, fairly unstructured access to the museum and its staff. A monster truck-scale coffee machine in a beautifully designed and cavernous kitchen and social space encourages casual conversations. The interiors, designed by Melbourne legends Six Degrees, give smaller organisations and freelancers the kind of aesthetic clout they wouldn’t have access to on their own. This stuff might sound trivial - but it helps you impress fancy clients.

We have the benefit of an extremely broad skillset amongst tenants – from developers, to motion graphics designers to VR producers to writers to photographers. If you have a question that needs answering, chances are that ACMI X houses someone who could answer it. To be honest, the holy grail of inter-office collaboration on actual projects has not yet occurred however this takes time, trust and stars aligning. We’re not quite there yet, but we’ll get there. I certainly know who I’ve got my sights on.

There is also the added benefit of being in close proximity to ACMI as a commissioning body. ACMI recently acquired a VR work by Sandpit, originally commissioned by Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney called ‘Ghosts, Toast and the Things Unsaid’. This work has an audience of two don ghost sheets and travel back in time to see a relationship between two characters deteriorate. Eventually, participants realise they have become the ghost of one of the two characters, Steve or Maude. As you look around their apartment, you can hear the inner thoughts of either character depending on which one you look at. In the end, it’s about the things you wished you’d said but never did.

Starting this Halloween, ACMI has engaged Sandpit to create an installation for the ‘Ghosts’ project that looks somewhere between a funeral parlour and carnival side-show. Audience members wear a VR headset, topped with the iconic ghost sheet and get whisked off to one of two booths where they arbitrarily become the ghost of either Steve or Maude.

It would be very dangerous of me to say that a definite benefit of co-working with a museum is that they will commission your work. Sandpit finds itself in a very privileged position because of this. The commissioning process, however, could not be running more smoothly. Starting with our contract, I’ve been able to run back and forth between my desk and ACMI’s legal team to ask and answer questions rapidly. This meant from first draft to execution, the contract manifested in record time. ACMI’s social media team sit directly in front of me and we’ve been able to devise a cunning social media campaign for the project, through a series of casual conversations. We have been able to pop over to ACMI’s Public Programs Manager, Helen Simondson’s desk to plan a seance party to launch the installation, – an idea that’s simmered due to our proximity rather than something that’s been cobbled together in a one-off meeting. Access to Seb Chan’s encyclopaedic museum knowledge is a matter of a five-second walk from my desk to his. ACMI’s bustling senior curator, Sarah Tutton, can whisk me away to the kitchen to talk through project logistics.

For this short period of time I can pretend, at least that I’m directly employed by ACMI, without being beholden to its larger corporate structures. And this is where ACMI itself can find value in its co-workers. Being either small organisations or freelancers, we are highly agile in the way we work. We all have small or singular chains of command and come up with ideas, make decisions and execute plans rapidly. ACMI as an organisation now has the ability to tap into this knowledge bank, either casually by the coffee machine, formally or both. This brings a hugely dynamic, surrogate workforce to ACMI that, on a tangible level adds a huge amount of capacity. On an intangible (and arguably more valuable) level, it creates a working environment that is more vibrant than a single organisation could ever be on its own.

Sandpit is a relatively small organisation but we are growing quickly. There will come a time in the future when we will outgrow our beloved home at ACMI X and move on. As alumni of the co-working space, I will be interested to see how our relationship with ACMI can continue. We’ll be advocates of the space but also perhaps industry partners who support the museum and its community however possible. Ultimately, it is this level of community-building on a local, national and international level that opportunities such as ACMI X engender. And in the end, it’s the conversations around the coffee machine that make it all possible.

Before you dismiss it as beautiful, but speculative, fiction, consider this: Pepper the "emotional support robot" is already on the market, programmed to read emotions and facial expressions, and to learn and grow as it interacts with people. When Pepper went on sale last year, the thousand units made available by SoftBank Robotics sold out within one minute. And while it (he? she?) has particularly powerful artificial intelligence (AI) powering its empathetic interactions, Pepper is only one of a number of therapy robots under development. So at some point in the future, we are going to have to grapple with the issues raised in Kim's animated fable--when does AI become sufficiently "I" to count as an autonomous being? The UK Office of Science and Innovation already foresees a day when robots demand the same rights as humans, including the right to love freely. Enjoy.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

When
the Alliance chose financial sustainability as one of three areas of focus for our
new strategic plan, I gravitated to one of the hardest challenges of all: how can
we help create financially sustainable models for supporting biological
research collections? To tackle that challenge, CFM is partnering with the
Ecological Society of America and the Peabody Museum of Natural History for a
workshop to be held at Yale University this December.

At
“FutureProofing Natural History Collections: Creating Sustainable Models for
Research Resources” natural history museum curators and collections staff, current
and potential users of collections, sustainability experts, management research
specialists, and future studies experts (that would be me) will spend two days mapping
the most effective ways to quantify and report on the value of research
collections, and generating ideas for new economic models that translate this
value into support.

I
believe it’s harder to find new and better support systems for natural history
collections than it is to find new economic models for other kinds of museums
and other areas of operations. NEW INC and ACMI X are showing how museums can
capitalize on space, expertise and reputation to create co-working spaces that generate new
income streams (earned and philanthropic). Museum Hack has shown us that
dynamic, irreverent, participatory tours can command a premium price. And I’m
morally convinced that museums are poised to capture some of the $18.4 billion in
federal support for primary education (not to mention comparable private funds)
as we show we can provide superior learning experiences. While it will take
much work to inject ideas and approaches such as these into the mainstream,
they can at least give paths to explore.

American Museum of NaturalHistory Frozen Tissue Collection

But
research collections are a hard sell. Most people don’t even know we have them,
and even fewer could name any tangible benefit they derive from shelves of
fluid collections, frozen tissue samples, or a few hundred Cornell drawers filled
with ticks. When pressed to make the case for how these collections benefit the
public, our field generally trots out the same worn examples: identifying which
bird hit an airplane; tracking vectors of disease and (more generally)
documenting biodiversity. Not that these are bad things, but so far they haven’t
been enough to make the case that either the government or individual citizens should
pay for these benefits.

From
a collections perspective, grant support has always been a dicey proposition. All
too often support for the collections resulting from research are an afterthought,
and museums’ responsibility to store and care for those collections, in
essence, an unfunded mandate. This past March NSF announced it was putting an indefinite
hold
on their Collections in Support of Biological Research (CSBR) Program—one of
the few sources of funds devoted to the care, organization, maintenance, and
cataloguing of biological collections. Even though the CSBR grants collectively
only represented about 0.06% of the NSF budget, they were widely seen as
critical to the field.

NSF
eventually restored funding, albeit on a biennial basis (effectively halving
the funds provided), and it does continue to express active concern for the
health and well-being of research collections –see, for example, its funding of
this workshop. I’ve got to sympathize with NSF’s dilemma—well-managed research
collections only ever get bigger. If they never develop sustainable income
streams, how can the federal government (particularly in this economic and political
climate) ever hope to keep pace?

Smithsonian Museum ofNatural HistoryOrnithology Collection

I
think there is a lot museums can do to make it easier for NSF, and other
funders, to restore and grow support. At heart, the funding challenges faced by
research collections are the same as those confronting all museums: how do we
quantify and document the benefits we provide to society? How do we make a
sound financial case that it’s worth it for some entity (whether that’s local,
state or federal governments, private industry or other service providers) to
pay for those benefits? What aspects of our resources and of our work have unexplored
value for other users?

Is
it going to be easy to make a better, more compelling case for funding, and
discover new income streams? No, but we hope to make a good start in New Haven.
If your museum or collection is pioneering new forms of support, through
business ventures, partnerships or new products & services, or if you’ve
found compelling new ways to document the value of your work, please shoot an
email to me at emerritt (at) aam-us.org. We have a few slots left in the
workshop, and we’d love to hear first-hand from museums trying new approaches
to financial sustainability for research collections.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

I’ve been intrigued by the El Segundo Museum
of Art since I first read about it in the Los
Angeles Times when the museum opened in 2013. That article
emphasized ESMoA’s focus on arts education, noting that four public schools are
within walking distance of the museum’s Main Street location. In the inaugural
exhibition, some works were hung a mere one foot off the floor—toddler height! Today
Chelsea Hogan, Education Specialist at ESMoA, gives us a first-hand account of
this community museum’s educational philosophy.

In 2012, while living in Los
Angeles, I heard through a colleague about an interesting opportunity at a new
place in El Segundo, California a town that I had only thought of as far away
and by the airport. Brian and Eva Sweeney, an ambitious couple originally from Canada and Germany, respectively, were the founders, and their idea to build a
storage space for their art collection was beginning to transform into an entirely
different animal. The El Segundo Museum of Art quickly became ESMoA, a self-described
“Art Laboratory” where I would play an instrumental role in propelling the education-focused
mission.

Chelsea Hogan teaching at ESMoA

I and another educator were the
first two employees. Yep, two educators were hired first. Before a director,
before an exhibit designer, before an HR person. We were tasked with jump-starting
the school program from concept to execution. We learned about the town, a
somewhat traditional, conservative, and family-focused little community, and
made connections with teachers and administrators. We visited the four nearby schools
time and time again, until everyone started to learn our names. We began
running the school program, a 90-minute experience featuring art making and
student-driven conversations around original works of art.

ESMoA is located on Main Street
between a former post office and a Mexican restaurant, in the heart of the
community. The front window is actually a giant door that opens completely, allowing the sidewalk to merge
seamlessly with the entryway. From the beginning, we wanted ESMoA to be a place
where everyone feels welcome, and our location and the open window/door reinforces
the idea that anyone can come in. Entry is always free, and most programs are
free too, aside from select events for which a fee goes directly and entirely
to a facilitator. Whenever anyone comes to ESMoA, an educator greets him or her,
and we have a grid system that allows you to find the info on your own terms. There
are no labels on the walls, but each artwork is accompanied by a number written
on the floor, so visitors can select an artwork number on a grid that is available
on our website and accessible via gallery iPads or their own smart phones. The
number is connected to a website, which provides links for further research and
a question that helps one to look deeper. In this way, visitors can acquire
information through the grid system, the books available, or by speaking with
an educator. Visitors are invited to make their own meaning, at the rate and in
the fashion that they are comfortable with. This open and Constructivist
interpretive structure encourages people to concentrate on looking at the art,
rather than reading label copy. We have topical books available and offer a multigenerational
scavenger hunt designed to help visitors of all ages look closer and engage
with art.

ESMoA exhibits fine art--sometimes
from the Sweeney’s own collection sometimes loaned works from other museums,
galleries, and private collections--and displays them in installations we call
Experiences. We call them this, because the intention is that the visitor truly
experiences art, rather than showing up to learn a curator’s thesis on a label
or wall text, as is often the case in typical institutions. Every few months,
the gallery is completely transformed into thematic displays. Instead of
attending an exhibition on 19th Century European Artists, for
example, a visitor would experience various meditations on a theme; such as
“FAME,” “TRUTH,” or “PLAN,” featuring art and historical objects from different
time periods and places related to the theme. We’ve worked with curators from
Germany and America, some who work independently and some whose full-time jobs
are at neighboring museums such as the Getty Research Institute, the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, and the Wende Museum. We consider ESMoA to be a
laboratory where these curators can play with exhibition and interpretation.

Teaching at ESMoA

Nearly four years since opening,
our staff has tripled, our efforts redoubled, but our mission remains the same.
ESMoA is entirely education-driven, with a mission to “spread the spark of
creativity.” My fellow education specialist, Holly M. Crawford, and I are
encouraged to experiment and to create innovative, Experience-inspired programming
for everybody. We’re given free rein to explore new programming avenues, guided
by our shared desire to be a place where everyone--not just artists and
academics--can be nourished by art.

We’ve held yoga and mindfulness meditation
programs in the gallery. We have a program for 3 and 4-year-olds, and one for
seniors. We have programs for families, and dating programs for singles. We
have cooking classes and artist demonstrations such as a live-tattoo
demonstration and a body painting installation. We have a pre-visit program
connected to our school program, in which we take original works of art to
classrooms. We have a teen program run by
teens. We have a remarkable internship program for young adults with developmental
delays, in which we teach them to work with school groups and eventually teach
with us in the gallery. This year we received an IMLS grant to extend our
efforts with this internship program into the virtual world, so that other
museums can learn how to implement something similar.

In my experience, ESMoA’s
education-centric model is in stark contrast to the more common museum culture
which relegates educators to second class status. All too often I hear from my
colleagues at other institutions that educational programs are an afterthought—and
rarely are educators seen as having a significant voice within institutions. I
hope ESMoA’s example can prompt more museums to put education in the center of
our practice, so that everyone within the institution is truly thinking about
the visitor experience. Education is, after all, at the core of many museum
missions, isn’t it time that museums really practice what they preach?

Today, I’m happy to be at an education-driven
“Art Laboratory” where, as an educator, I not only have a voice at the table, but
am actually considered a major player, and a person of influence on the team. I’m
proud of the programming we’ve done, and excited for the future.

Friday, September 9, 2016

As you may have guessed from Wednesday's wordless post, I'm glued to the Paralympics this week. Today I'm encouraging you to watch this trailer for the 2016 Paralympic games titled "We're the Superhumans."After you've had your mind blown by the abilities of these athletes (and dancers, and musicians), spend a bit of time thinking about the convoluted and increasingly problematic criteria we use to determine who is eligible to compete in which games (Olympic or Paralympic) and in which gender category. Consider the following:Double amputee Oscar Pistorius had to petition the IOC to be allowed to compete against able-bodied runners--he was initially banned from the 2008 games due to concerns that his specially designed carbon fiber running blades gave him an unfair advantage. He was, eventually, allowed to compete. However, full-body swimsuits have been banned from competition, even though everyone (theoretically) could adopt this wearable technology.A large number of male Olympians carry a variant of the EPOR gene that results in the production of additional red blood cells--which confers a tremendous advantage in speed or power sports. Competitors are banned from inducing the same effect through the use of hormones or hormone-promoting drugs.Yet...Female athletes with naturally high levels of testosterone are banned from competing, or required to undergo chemical or surgical intervention to bring the amount of this hormone in their blood below a level considered "normal." (See this long and excellent article from The New York Times on the history of humiliating treatment of "intersex" athletes.)I recently listened to episode 226 of the podcast 99% Invisible exploring how Belgian astronomer/mathematician Adolphe Quetelet first applied the concept of "average" to people in the early 19th century. This innovation shaped the standardization of military clothing and equipment (and, in turn, of civilian fashion sizing). One eventual ripple effect: the deaths of a large number of pilots in WWII, when it became evident that designing sensitive, high performance equipment for a fictional "average" airman meant it didn't work well for anyone.Rapid developments in gene therapy, gene editing, prosthetics and neural implants will expand the range of human variation even further, making "average" even less meaningful as a benchmark for design--whether of spaces, equipment or regulations.

Average is often conflated with normal, making anyone sufficiently far from the mathematical center "abnormal" and relegating them to the statues of "other."Your Futurist Friday assignment: over the next few days, look at the world with fresh eyes. What concepts of "normal" or "average" shape the physical spaces, the written or unwritten rules of behavior of your environment? When do these principles of design result in places and policies that don't work for you, members of your family, or people you know. How would the world be different if they were designed around the full range of human ability and identity? And with that in mind, is there anything you would change in your home, your neighborhood, your museum right now, to make it work for people who don't inhabit the vanishingly small mathematical point that is "average?"

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

As I noted in last month’s post about
the web site Museums
& Migration, mass migration has been described as
“the defining issue of this century.” A large segment of these migrants are
refugees, fleeing political upheaval, persecution or environmental disasters. The
federal Office of Refugee Resettlement has helped over 10,000 refugees settle
in Erie, Pennsylvania. In this week’s post John Vanco, Director of the Erie Art Museum, tells us how the museum is helping people these new residents,
who now make up over ten per cent of the city’s population.

The Erie Art Museum is a medium-sized institution in a rust-belt city. We are
fortunate enough to have a broad mission that includes encouraging art in all
its forms and building community among artists, art students and the public.
Even so, some board members and staff have questioned why an art museum has
embraced an early childhood and refugee-based program that has nothing to do
with current exhibits. We do it because no other institution in our region is
treating refugees as the cultural assets that they are. We do it because we’ve
literally seen the lives of refugees change when they get jobs that honor their
talents. And, we have watched them develop as artists as a result.

“Old Songs New Opportunities” is not a typical art museum program,
but it is typical of the new way museums are reaching communities and creating
life-changing programming. Among the functions of the Erie Art Museum, the
regional Folk Art Support Center is very important. We work with regional folk
artists and help them preserve and share their traditions. The refugee
community in Erie is especially rich in folk traditions and particularly interested
in seeing their work preserved—whatever forced them to flee their native lands
has put their folk art in jeopardy. They come here having lost everything—their
homes and possessions, their citizenship in their native countries, and often
the lives of friends and family members. Under pressure to assimilate, learn
English, and make a living—relentlessly reinforced by the rapid Americanization
of their offspring—their cultural traditions are often abandoned, despite their
power to make meaning of the tumult in their lives. Our museum believes that
helping them figure out how to transplant, preserve, and continue those
traditions is crucial work.

We also
recognize that folk art flourishes when it serves a need beyond aesthetic
contemplation. “Old Songs New Opportunities” (OSNO) literally puts refugee
women and their substantial indigenous knowledge to work. Refugee women are
culturally rich, but economically poor. They need training and employment
opportunities. Since 2003 we’ve been training former refugee and Hispanic women
to work in childcare and to share their cultural knowledge and traditional
children’s songs on the job. Their rich folk culture can be an anchor for these
women as they grapple with the challenges of a new life in a new country. It
can also be a treasure for our community. While most Americans have lost the
ability to sing with and to our children, those from traditional cultures use
song to bond with and educate their young.

Singing in
American culture is considered the purview of professionals. Shows like
“American Idol” symbolize and popularize the conception that singing is only
for those with natural talent. Most Americans think of singing only in the
context of a performance—our material wealth and high production standards
bring an unending stream of perfectly polished recordings and videos into all
our homes, iPods, and automobiles. Most childcare teachers were raised not with
singing parents or caregivers, but with records, television, and compact discs.

Ironically,
our children are deprived as a result. For thousands of years traditional
cultures have used song and dance with children to soothe them, teach social
skills, build fine and gross motor coordination, and spur language development.
Research has proven that singing with children is essential to their brain
development. Yet there are few American childcare teachers who are comfortable
with singing and make use of its potential throughout the day. In 2013 we
expanded “Old Songs New Opportunities” to provide song coaching for hundreds of
local teachers. Former refugees enter our program and we place them in classrooms
so that they can help Americans learn about their culture and draw from these
lessons, implementing tools for classroom management like how to use songs to
help children line up, clean up, or even wait for lunch. These “Old Songs New
Opportunities” ambassadors also mentor teachers and help them learn how to use songs
to improve the mood of their classroom, allow children to express themselves
physically, vent frustrations, teach sharing, and mark transitions from one
activity to another.

We have
benefited from this work as well. We can boast excellent relationships with our
refugee community, the social service agencies that serve them, and scores of
child care programs. These relationships have generated new collaborations and an
increase in tours. Former refugees and early childhood teachers who never would
have considered visiting the museum are now part of our regular audience.

I’ve always been
proud of our museum’s art collection. Now,
I can also be proud of our song collection. We’ve collected over 100
traditional children’s songs from Bosnia, Russia, Ukraine, Bhutan, Nepal, Iraq,
Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Burundi, Puerto Rico and Somalia. Today thousands of
children across our county are singing these songs. We have produced recordings
of all the songs, and have just released a compilation CD featuring 36
traditional children's songs from around the world, selected from more than 100
collected to date.

As far as we
know, “Old Songs New Opportunities” is the only program like it in the country.
We are eager to find other communities that would like to pilot it. Although it
may be a stretch for an art museum, this is a natural project for a children’s
or historical museum. We believe that our program is an antidote to bigotry. It
celebrates multiple perspectives and our universal desire to nurture young
children.

Monday, September 5, 2016

School started last week for Vermont students, and incoming high school freshmen are going to be exploring a fragment of the future. The class of 2020 will be the first students covered by Vermont Act 77, which mandates personalized learning plans for every secondary-school student. The Act is designed to "create opportunities for secondary students to pursue flexible pathways to graduation" and specifies that these pathways can include "applied or work-based learning opportunities" Since the act was signed into law in 2013, I've been searching for Vermont museums that propose to be part of students personal learning pathways. So here's another shout-out: HEY VERMONT MUSEUMS, WASSUP WITH ACT 77???" And to get everyone jazzed up about a future in which personal learning is validated in all 50 states, see what Vermont high-schoolers have to sing (and dance, and play) about the matter:

Friday, September 2, 2016

This past April Durita Dahl Andreassen of Visit Faroe Islands launched a social media campaign to get Google to send it's Street View cameras to the Islands (even though they don't actually have many, you know, roads). Her approach? Mount solar powered 360 degree cameras on the back of sheep to show that mapping the rocky islands could be done.

In addition to providing proof of concept, the campaign garnered a lot of attention because...sheep. (Aka "fluffy camera operators.)Did her strategy work? Yes! Durita's latest post reports Google staff have arrived and are preparing to deploy their own cameras via "sheep, bikes, backpacks, ships and even a wheelbarrow." I could make a point about how this story demonstrates the power of social media, or how increasingly powerful, portable technologies are bridging the "digital divide" in remote areas of the world. But, nah....I just love the sheep. Enjoy!Have a great Labor Day weekend.